


wasteland, baby

by ohmygodwhy



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Drug Addiction, Gen, Love & Loss, M/M, Tattoos, u know it babey!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-01 16:58:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17871152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: He gets the tattoos on his hands at eighteen, ‘cause he thinks it’s fucking funny.





	wasteland, baby

**Author's Note:**

> klaus: appeared on screen  
> my predictable ass: .........eyes emoji
> 
> anyway i said fuck a thesis and watched the whole season in 2 days instead!

 

He gets the tattoos at eighteen, ‘cause he thinks it’s fucking funny. HELLO on one hand, GOODBYE on the other - ‘cause he’s like, a fuckin human ouija board, saying bonjour and sayonara to all kinds of crazy dead people, right? It’s After the mausoleum but Before Ben, and he sneaks out the night of their eighteenth birthday, because it’s such a huge pain in everyone’s ass having to share a birthday with six other kids (five, really, because Five is gone so he can’t celebrate his birthday anymore), but of course the old man wouldn’t do anything like letting them have their own, separate celebrations, or anything. So they all have to find ways to do it themselves.

Allison and Luther fuck off somewhere to whisper and smile a lot, Diego spends the rest of the night hogging mom all to himself, Vanya… he doesn’t know what Vanya does, really. Klaus, though, does it by sneaking out and getting the palms of his hands tattooed. Maybe he’s kinda out of it, cause he lit up a blunt earlier and blew the smoke out his window, but he’s aware enough to know how funny it is, how much it hurts, and how utterly fucking pissed off Dad is gonna be tomorrow morning.

And he is. _Super._ Pissed.

Klaus stands in front of him the next morning, palms vaguely itchy but refusing to scratch at them, and listens to Dad go on for the better part of like, an hour, about how irresponsible he is, and how stupid the tattoos are, and how disappointed he is in him, and how he expected better. He almost thinks to ask ‘ _did you really?’_ , but decides better at the last moment. Besides, no amount of yelling is gonna make the tattoos disappear, and Klaus refuses to suffer through getting them removed, so they end up staying.

“Klaus,” Ben whispers to him later in the hallway, pulling him aside anxiously, “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” Klaus says, starts off loud but brings his voice down to a whisper, ‘cause he knows Ben is nervous about anyone overhearing; he hates to disappoint dad, or Luther, and Klaus would say something about how hanging around _him_ all the time is probably not the best way to Not disappoint dad or Luther, but he doesn’t, “That I’m an adult now, and so I can do what I want with my own body. I could get my bellybutton pierced, or something.”

“ _Don’t_ get your bellybutton pierced,” Ben says, like it’s automatic. Maybe if it was Luther saying it, or Dad, Klaus would get defensive, but it’s not one of them, it’s Ben, so Klaus just huffs a laugh.

“Why not? They’re totally in right now.”

Ben’s mouth twitches up in a nervous little smile. “At least you could hide one of those. Everyone’s gonna see your hands.”

Klaus beams; he can’t help himself. “That’s the point! Aren’t they so funny?”

Ben doesn’t seem to think it’s nearly as funny as Klaus does, but that doesn’t matter, because an Unimpressed Ben is better than a Nervous Ben, or a Sad Ben, or any of the other Ben’s that Klaus’s been seeing so much of lately.

“They could totally be useful, too,” he adds, because Luther is suddenly there, hunching his way down the hallway.

“Yeah?” Luther says, eyebrows rising all high and mighty like Dad’s do whenever Klaus like, opens his mouth. “How’s that?”

“Y’know, if there’s a ghost who doesn’t speak English or something. Or they can’t talk, for whatever reason. Non-verbal communication is all the rage.”

“You only have two words.”

“Are you suggesting I get more?”

Luther immediately backtracks, and the way he fumbles makes Klaus smile, “ _No_ , no, not at all.”

“Maybe I could get the alphabet on my chest,” he suggests.

“And the numbers all up your arms,” Ben adds, shocking Klaus into a laugh.

“I’m at a crime scene, talkin’ to a ghost in front of a camera, and I just lift up my shirt after I ask them a question! God, can you imagine the look on Dad’s face!”

“Klaus,” Luther says, and now he’s back to being Daddy’s Number One. It was annoying when they were kids, and now that they’re certified adults, it’s kind of getting old. “Do not get the alphabet tattooed on your chest.”

And he sounds so damn serious about it, Klaus can’t help himself - he bursts out laughing. “Luther,” he says, putting his hands on the big guy’s shoulders - palms down, HELLO, GOODBYE, spoken right into his shirt, “I promise you, I won’t get the alphabet tattooed on my chest.”

Luther visibly relaxes, and god, the guy is gonna kill him one day. “Can’t say for sure about the numbers, though,” he adds. Ben laughs, just a bit, and Luther’s shoulders go up and up and Klaus ducks out of the hallway and down the stairs, because it’s worth Luther’s aggravated _Klaus!_ following him down.

Diego calls him a dumbass, and Allison says they’re oddly Hollywood. She’s been eyeing Hollywood like it’s the goddamn golden apple and she’s - Aphrodite, or whoever it was that started the Trojan War. He thinks that’s the right story. Five was a big mythology guy, before he disappeared. Klaus thinks that Allison would do pretty good in Hollywood - she has a good, solid stage presence, and she’s pretty, and she could literally get any role she wanted to, if she wanted it bad enough.

Vanya doesn’t say much to him - she doesn’t say much to anybody, anymore - but she does say she thinks his tattoos are pretty neat. He thinks that’s very nice of her.

 

He gets his second tattoo after Ben… dies. After Ben dies, but not really for him, because Ben is right there in the tattoo parlor with him, saying how much he hates it.

“I hate it,” Ben says, crouching over Klaus next to the tattoo artist.

“It’s just a ‘B’,” Klaus whispers. The tattoo artist doesn’t even blink, even though Klaus is, appearance-wise, talking to himself here. This is on the far side of town from where he got his first tattoos done; this poor bastard probably gets crackheads in here every other day of the week. Which - well, Klaus is also In The Clouds right now, so it’s kind of valid of the guy to assume he’s one of the crackheads. He's willing to bet none of the crackheads that've sat in this chair have been talking to the real ghost of their dead brother who died horrifically before their very eyes, so. He wins. 

“It’s an ugly ‘B’. Real tacky.”

“How can a letter be tacky?”

“I don’t like the font.”

“You are so picky. I’m paying homage to your tragic death.”

“With a _letter_ ,” Ben sighs; he’s gotten so much more outspoken now that he’s dead, suddenly has an attitude and everything. Klaus suspects that if it were anyone else Ben were able to singularly be able to interact with, he wouldn’t be nearly this used to talking shit; Klaus just has that kind of effect on people, he muses. “You could’ve at least picked a meaningful quote, or something.”

A meaningful quote. Klaus considers this for a moment.

“Hey,” he says to the tattoo artist; the buzz of the needle stops, “C’ld I make a quick request?”

He leaves the tattoo parlor with ‘rest in **B** eace’ tattooed above his left shoulder blade. The B, of course, is in the big, tacky, fancy font that the guy was already halfway done with and couldn’t change, so Klaus just told him to go along and finish it up.

It’s stupid, and probably makes him look like even more of a crackhead than usual, but it has Ben laughing - the in-tears, breathless kind of laughter - as they leave the shop. Klaus hasn’t heard him laugh like that since - well, maybe since never, ‘cause he was a sad kind of kid and a trapped kind of adult and then he was dead. It makes Klaus feel like less of a huge, monumental waste of space, making his dead brother laugh like that.

He smiles to himself, even as his back stings like a motherfucker under his jacket, and listens to the silent, dead laughter only he can hear.

“I hope you’re happy,” he says, “I think a simple ‘B’ woulda been perfectly fine.”

 

He gets his third tattoo in nineteen sixty-fucking-eight. Vietnam, which would’ve been something not ever possible before their brother dropped out of the sky, saying he was all from the future and shit. Klaus got tortured and locked in a closet - where he hasn’t been since he was fourteen and accidentally came out on live television, thank you very much - for days, just to wind up in the middle of a war that ended decades ago.

But that’s okay - that’s fine with him, really - because he got to meet Dave. If there’s one glorious, beautiful, amazing thing that came out of this shit show of a week - of a life, maybe - it’s meeting Dave.

They get wasted as hell, shots on shots on shots, because another job well done, and all that, and it’s also Dave’s birthday. He’s turning thirty two, and Klaus thinks about turning eighteen, and tells him that they should get him a tattoo, just for the fun of it.

“We’ll be in deep shit if any of the higher ups find out,” Dave says, like they won’t be in deep shit if anyone finds out about anything they’re doing. Klaus raises his eyebrows, and Dave laughs like he’s reading his mind - and that’s the thing about Dave, is that it feels like they’ve known each other forever and ever, like he understands Klaus and he sees him and feels him and knows him.

Klaus doesn’t know if anyone has ever known him, seen him, and still liked him afterwards.

They sneak out like Klaus is eighteen again, and it takes them half the night to find a tattoo place and the other half to get it done.

“If I have to get one,” Dave says, with his beautiful fucking eyes, “So do you.”

They can’t do anything sappy or stupid like get each other’s _names_ written into their skin, because it’s not even the seventies yet and hello? homosexual alert? So they don’t end up getting anything really matching - no cliche puzzle pieces, or anything like that.

Klaus does the manly thing and gets the street address of the bar they first danced in, written into the skin of his right wrist. It truly does hurt like a bitch - hurts like the time he made Luther _mad_ mad and he shoved Klaus into a dresser and fractured his ribs - but he thinks it’s worth it.

Dave gets this little crescent moon in the same place, with a star next to it, tucked into its curve. It’s nice and simple and pretty - vaguely Hollywood, he hears eighteen year old Allison say. When Klaus asks, after they pay and leave, why a moon, why a star, Dave looks at him and says: “it’s you”. Like it’s that fucking simple. Like Klaus could ever be the moon - and god, he thinks inexplicably of Luther, of his father, and it’s like he can never escape that - or like Klaus could ever be a star, something shiny, something pretty.

It’s like Klaus is seeing something different when he look through Dave’s eyes, like he’s seeing a different version of himself. Someone better, someone Not Fucked Up, someone who doesn’t see ghosts and live in the shadows of a fucked up youth, or whatever. He wants to be the person that Dave sees, wants to be him so badly it aches. And Dave makes him feel like he could. He wants to drown in him, drown in his eyes and his smile and the heartbreaking way he looks at him.

When Dave dies, Klaus presses his thumb into the star on Dave’s wrist, shaking fingers curled tight around his wrist like if he just presses hard enough, he’ll feel a pulse, feel the blood pumping through his veins - feel him living, again. But Klaus’ specialty has never been with the living, and he is nobody’s star, and he does not think he has ever loved someone more than himself until now, and he can’t feel a fucking pulse, no matter how hard he presses, no matter how much he begs, no matter how tight he shuts his eyes.

When he gets back to the future - back to the present, maybe - he looks at the address on his wrist and thinks about going to see if the bar is still there. If maybe it’s still standing after all these years that have gone by in all these seconds. But he decides against it, because the world is ending in a few days anyways, and going back to the place they first danced and kissed and loved won’t bring Dave back in any way or shape or form.

There’s another, better way he can see him, he knows - he realizes, almost, because he’s spent so many years of his life trying to block the power out. He hasn’t been _sober_ sober since - since high school, maybe. In and out of rehab like it’s a revolving door, like it’s a Starbucks and he’s a regular.

There’s a better way than the address on his wrist. He just has to get sober.

(He has never, ever, been good at getting sober.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> comment to get me to Work On My Thesis it's screaming at me whenever i open google docs


End file.
